Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

The easy problems and the hard problem

the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react
to environmental stimuli;

the integration of information by a cognitive system;

the reportability of mental states;

the ability of a system to access its own internal states;

the focus of attention;

the deliberate control of behavior;

the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience.

How?
Why?

Functional explanation

cognitive abilities and functions.

How do we explain the performance of a function?
By specifying a mechanism that performs the function.

[function, causation, explanation]

What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique
is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions.

no analogous further question in the explanation of genes, or
of life, or of learning.

explanatory gap

This is not to say that experience has no function

[correlation, causality, telekinesis]

Some case-studies

"neurobiological theory of consciousness" Crick and Koch
35-75 hertz neural oscillations in the cerebral cortexbinding of information contents
Binding is the process whereby separately represented pieces of information
about a single entity are brought together to be used by later processing,
as when information about the color and shape of a perceived object
is integrated from separate visual pathways.

these oscillations are the neural correlates of experience.
the explanatory question remains:
Why do the oscillations give rise to experience?

Baars' global workspace theory of consciousness

"Neural Darwinism" model of Edelman (1989)
nothing about why there should also be experience
"multiple drafts" model of Dennett (1991)
"intermediate level" theory of Jackendoff (1988)

Ways to beg the question:
explain something elsedeny the phenomenon
claim to be explaining experience

explain the structure of experienceisolate the substrate of experience

theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental.
Where there is a fundamental property, there are fundamental lawspsychophysical principles will "not interfere" with physical laws,
physical laws already form a closed system.
they will be a supplement to a physical theory
tells us how physical processes give rise to experience.

[How? Parallelism? Correlates? Causation?
Explanation?]

does not tell us why there is experience in the first
place
-- same for any fundamental theory

[So, no answer to "Why?"]

an innocent version of dualism

theory of consciousness will have more in common
with a theory in physics than a theory in biology

this position still concedes an explanatory gap
between physical processes and experience

[How? Why? Causality needed, not
just correlation.]

Outline of a theory of consciousness

This sort of analysis can yield a number of principles
relating consciousness and cognition... a fundamental theory

[correlating]

A nonreductive theory of consciousness
will consist in a number of psychophysical principlesconnecting the properties of physical processes to the properties
of experience

[Correlation, not causation, hence not an explanation]

The principle of structural coherence.
coherence between the structure of consciousness
and the structure of awareness

Awareness is a purely functional notion
but it is nevertheless intimately linked to conscious experience

[correlated: why/how felt?]

Every subject's experience can be at least partly characterized and decomposed
in terms of these structural properties: similarity and difference relations

[Correlations: how? why?
and what about commensurability?]

For every distinction between color experiences
there is a corresponding distinction in processing

[JNDs: just-noticeable-differences:correlations: how/why felt?]

The three-dimensional structure of phenomenal color space corresponds directly to the three dimensional structure of visual
awareness

[correlates: how/why felt?
commensurable?]

geometric structure of the visual field directly reflected in a structure that can be recovered from visual
processing

[correlated: how/why?]

given only the story about information-processing
in an agent's visual and cognitive system,
we could not directly observe that agent's visual experiences
but we could nevertheless infer those experiences' structural properties

but not all properties of experience are structural properties:
e.g. the intrinsic nature of a sensation of red
cannot be fully captured in a structural description

[the felt quality is all of the
hard problem
and it is not "captured" at all without
explaining the correlations causally:
how/why?]

inverted spectrum scenarios,
where experiences of red and green are inverted
but all structural properties remain the same,
show that structural properties constrain experience without exhausting it

[Without even touching the (hard) fact that
experience is felt experience]

The principle of structural coherence
allows for a very useful kind of indirect explanation

[No explanation: merely restatement of
unexplainedcorrelation between function and feeling]

The coherence between consciousness and awareness
also allows a natural interpretation of work in neuroscience
directed at isolating the substrate (or the neural correlate)
of consciousness.

[Correlation allow interpretation of correlation
as correlation, between behavior and brain function
and between both of those and feeling:
what is needed is how/why explanation
of how/why the function is felt]

if we accept the coherence principle
we have reason to believe
that the processes that explain awareness
will at the same time be part of the basis of consciousness.

[!]

The principle of organizational invariance.

any two systems with the same fine-grained functional organization
will have qualitatively identical experiences

what matters for the emergence of experience
is not the specific physical makeup of a system,
but the abstract pattern of causal interaction between its components

[some functions are implementation-independent
some are not;
all computation is imlementation-independent
but cognitive function is not all computational function;
computation is not causality;
and none of this explains the correlation
between function and feeling]

reductio ad absurdum
one system is made of neurons and the other of silicon,
one experiences red where the other experiences blue
imagine gradually transforming one into the other
Along this spectrum, there must be two systems A and B
that are physically identical,
except that a small neural circuit in A has been replaced by a silicon
circuit in B.
What happens when we flip the switch?
By hypothesis, the system's conscious experiences
will change; from red to blue,
But there is no way for the system to notice the changes!
Its causal organization stays constant
so that all of its functional states and behavioral dispositions stay
"dancing qualia"

[Two equivocations:
functionally equivalent is not the same as identical,
only empirically identical is;
so feelings could be changing, without theirchangingness itself being felt ("change-blindness")
-- the incommensurability problem.
But this is all just unconstrained speculation, as
the (hard) question of the causal basis for the correlation
is left as unexplained as ever]

functionally isomorphic systems must have the same sort of experiences

[Only empirical identity is 100% functional
isomorphism: and that
does not solve any problems: just shows computation is not causality,
and cognition is not just computation]

the only physical properties directly relevant
to the emergence of experience
are organizational properties.